Tag Archives: Mike Nock

The shortlist for this year’s Australian Jazz “BELL” Awards has been officially announced. This year’s crop has been extraordinary, with many great albums submitted in the competition. The amount of talent in this list is overwhelming, and it is bound to make the work of the judges very hard

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Over the 10 day duration of the festival I’d encountered orthodox jazz rhythms, experimental jazz and music that you could argue was not jazz at all. Had I selected a different schedule of artists, I may have had a totally different festival experience altogether, such was the variety of shows on offer.

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Prolific, exciting, excitable – Mike Nock is visiting Melbourne to play a duo gig with Laurence Pike at the 2014 Melbourne International Jazz Festival on Saturday 7 June. (see more information on the MIJF website >) His duo performance with Laurence Pike at the festival is, he says, ‘really a new approach’. ‘I don’t think …

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His ideas are clear and strong, and deceptively simple motifs unfold and develop in unexpected ways, always maintaining the listener’s interest. Suite SIMA is a model of how to write for a medium-sized jazz ensemble that will provide student composers and arrangers with many lessons and lots of inspiration.

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‘That’s the thing about this music,’ Nock adds, ‘you can’t just write it without the musicians. It’s who you’re writing for. One of the things that I am really trying to do with the piece is to show that it is a living music in that it depends on the people playing it.’

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Friday Video: from Kindred by Mike Nock and Laurenz Pike. “…a dialogue between two old friends: a moment of pure improvisation, music drawn from many wells that need no special pleading or labels, open to all willing to engage it.”

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Two generations of Australian music come together in the music of Mike Nock and Laurenz Pike. It’s a musical conversation across the years, united by a commitment to storytelling through improvisation and the tradition of music as a spiritual, emotional, communicative art form.